04-22-2009, 09:22 AM
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#52 (permalink)
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Psycho
Location: the center of the multiverse
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Here's one woman columnist's interesting take on it...
Quote:
The XX Factor: The Contrarian Take on Susan Boyle
By Meghan O'Rourke
Posted Wednesday, April 22, 2009 8:16 AM
I didn't see the Susan Boyle clip until Sunday, and unlike everyone else in America, I didn't find it moving. Instead, I found it to be a savvy, cynical piece of TV editing. The visual sequence (the one now on YouTube) is perfectly designed to elicit a crude catharsis in its viewers—to borrow a crucial critical term from one of our earliest drama critics, Aristotle. The skeptic in me hardly believes it wasn't scripted. All the obvious reasons why so many have found it so "moving" have been trotted out. Letty Cottin Pogrebin proclaimed it a powerful strike against pervasive "ageism," a clip that showed us how wrongly snide we are about the dreams of a plain 47-year-old woman. And on one level, that's right. Boyle's life has been changed. (For now, at least.) But the real catharsis the sequence offers is that it lets us indulge as a group (this is crucial) our culture's superficial feelings about appearance, age, sexual worth, and then expel them. (Boyle is as unerotic as it gets; actually, she's an-erotic, since she has never even been kissed.) Watching at first, we too are the sneering audience members, the young girls who roll their eyes. (Note how carefully edited the audience shots are.) But—then, cue the music, and even as Boyle is just opening her mouth, people's faces are lighting up. She has relaxed into herself and her voice is... pretty good. (Not great.) And so we get to exhale and let our saccharine hearts soar with the schmaltzy music as, for a moment, we see "proven" on TV that looks and sex aren't everything. For that moment, the light mantle of eros even seems to rest around Boyle—she smiles, she has some cultural worth, someone, we think, might even kiss her one day! Thus, release. In a sense, Boyle inhabits the role of the scapegoat of early village traditions whom we punish with exile (or sneering), but whom we now, through the magic vehicle of TV, welcome back into the fold, surprising ourselves with our capacious hearts.
But do not take this for a moment to be a blow in the face of ageism. Or a sign that we're becoming a more thoughtful culture. Just listen to the condescension in beautiful, tanned, made-over Amanda Holden's language when she tells newspapers that the moment they give Boyle a makeover would be the moment "it's spoilt." Indeed, it would be. It would mean we couldn't for that moment feel our little hit of catharsis, of canned "uplift," before going to our usual over-valorization of erotic value and celebrity plasticity. In one sense, Robin Givhan was wrong yesterday to suggest we're fooling ourselves if we think Boyle doesn't need a makeover. She does. But my bet is that the makeover will only disenchant us with her over time. We got the hit we needed, and like any stimulant, its effect will decrease as we try to re-experience it.
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http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/xxf...san-boyle.aspx |
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